This thesis takes as its starting point the pedagogical and clinical practice of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris in the second half of the 19th century, where a group of pioneers in the field of modern neurology developed a specific scientific apparatus for the production and spectacularization of hystero-epilepsy through hypnosis, public demonstrations and publications of photographic albums of their patients. The research situates the analysis of different practices of documenting and staging the compulsive cataleptic state and the somnambulism of the hysterical attack within a broader conception of the modern (female) body at the intersection between a performative, a visual emblem and a classificatory object, which unfolds within the constitution of the aesthetico-political regime of the tableau: a painting, a theatrical scene and a table.
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